Thirty-Nine #2
It took all the time they had left, and ideally should have taken longer.
Clement sang them the first treatment note, and Jehan took Perrin into the half-under state.
Monitoring the patient’s heart and lungs took concentration, but Clement trusted Jehan in this; and it was hard not to also be aware of the magic of the others, going to work in the body.
They started with the muscle spasms. Estiene, directing, only spoke to murmur that he needed a little more of a push, or to signal Clement that they were getting off-balance and he needed the others brought back to the harmonic of his work.
“That feels better,” said Moyna, after some time.
“Now for the larger picture,” said Estiene. “Tixerrant, only as much as you can handle.”
Alys nodded. She’d managed to support Estiene without breaking out of the array or panicking, which was something.
Now the flow of magic in Perrin took on a deeper, stronger note, working patiently to try to soothe the invisible inflammation.
On, and on, and on. Clement was alert for the first souring of magic, but nothing happened.
On, and on. The healing held.
“We’re near time,” said Clement eventually. “Fortier?”
“I don’t want to bring her out too fast,” said Jehan. “Finish up, Marcelle.”
Estiene’s magic withdrew; Alys and Moyna dropped their hands. Clement kept their own on Perrin’s wrist until the patient was fully awake again and Jehan’s fingers removed from their temples. Perrin sat up, slowly.
“Oh, that was odd. You’re done already? It feels—better than in years,” Perrin said, rolling their head on their neck.
Clement swallowed a little gulp of laughter. If it did work, after all—
Then Perrin’s arm twitched, pain crossed their face, and their hand went to their shoulder.
“No.” Their voice wobbled. “No, it’s back. I’m so sorry, Scholars, for a moment I thought—”
The clock’s hands went vertical. The bell rang.
End of the Grand Exam.
And the end, too, of the proctor geas.
Estiene stood and kicked Perrin’s chair across the floor. It skidded on a surface which had been polished to a dull shine by endless pairs of healer and scholar boots.
Around them, the curtaining illusion dropped with a sudden inrushing of magic and vocal noise that made Clement’s ears pop.
Dean Brodier and Healer Hilaret were seated in the closest row to the floor, and near them was not only Chancellor Morant but the other Deans of the Academie, and a sprinkling of other blue-robed healers.
To their left and a few rows back was Jourdain Marcelle, and further along again was Captain Thoury and a couple of uniformed gendarmes.
The rest of the Theatre was filled with the grey robes of Academie scholars, all whispering amongst themselves.
Brodier had taken the bait of a grander stage.
And the words that Alys had dropped in the ears of several lower-year scholars had done the rest. The Teaching Theatre wasn’t the Rondelle; the viewing area had multiple entrances, and the artificers hastily adapting the space for exams hadn’t bothered to put any kind of restrictions on them.
Once the exam began, scholars would have been able to trickle in at leisure.
Hilaret and the Chancellor had their heads together, talking and frowning. Brodier was on her feet. She had a piece of paper in her hands and her stride was brisk and tense, bringing her across to the five steep stairs that led down onto the theatre floor.
Clement clenched their hand into a fist, then released it. The exam group was all on their feet now.
“Dean Brodier,” said Alys. “Thank you for—well, the opportunity, I suppose? I’m sorry we couldn’t do it.”
“I’m not,” said Estiene, radiating fury. “How did you ever approve that as an exam case? I know we’re marked on the process as well as the result, but to be handed an impossible thing—”
“Be quiet for once, Marcelle,” snapped Brodier. Then collected herself. “Tixerrant—give me a moment.” She found their chalked treatment plan at the side of the theatre floor and began looking between it and her own paper. After a minute or so she straightened.
“Scholars.” Her voice carried, and the Chancellor looked down. “Would you please—try again?”
“Try again?” said Alys, over an outcry of similar disbelief from the observing scholars in the Theatre. “But the exam’s over. We had the hour, and we failed.”
A complicated train of glances happened: Brodier to the Chancellor, the Chancellor over their shoulder to the Head Healer.
A flicker of disgust happened beside Brodier’s nose.
She could say this was to allow Estiene a chance, that she was doing what the Chancellor had told her to do, and getting Marcelle’s son across the line by whatever means necessary.
“In light of the extraordinary nature of your exam,” Brodier said, “which, yes, I’m sure you have recognised by now .
. . and of which word must have somehow spread,” she added, glancing at the grey-robed audience, “I would like to see you try again. Your solution, as proposed, is completely correct. There must have been a small error in how you performed it, that’s all.
I can stand tangent to the treatment radial and monitor it, this time. ”
“We were right?” said Clement. “The array we did—that was the right one?”
“Yes.” Brodier held up the paper. “I developed this technique myself,” she said.
“I have been researching, on my own, possible cures for the serrage. I didn’t intend to publish until I was absolutely sure of its feasibility.
Your exam is the proof, and this case is the culmination of the previous four, as you have seen.
It reflects the process by which I arrived at this technique.
At present,” she added, directly to the Chancellor, “the cure is only workable in patients who are also healing mages. But I’m sure that I will be able to refine it further, with the Academie’s resources behind me, now that it’s all out in the open. ”
Clement darted a look up at Dean Saige, who was holding on to the railing and frowning.
“Dean Brodier,” said Alys quietly. “With all due respect, if you think we did it correctly, perhaps it just doesn’t work.”
“It works. It has to work.” Around the paper her knuckles were white.
“Has it worked in previous trials, Brodier?” It was the Chancellor.
“I will monitor,” said Brodier firmly. “In my capacity as Dean of Assessment— Scholars, you may have an exemption. If you can make it work this time—”
“And if it doesn’t work, Mathilde, you can blame them?” called Dean Saige. “Five fifth-year scholars, to manage something this large? This is a preposterous way of presenting a technique. Just say you’ve tried, and failed, and be done with this farce.”
Brodier was white. “Please try,” she said to them, and Clement had a moment of strange, skewering pity.
They remembered Ysabel, dead on the floor.
“We’ll try again,” said Clement.
There was no point re-chalking. The array they formed this time had no radials. It was a circle. Clement sat at Perrin’s head and gave them the most reassuring smile they could.
“Trust us just a little longer,” they said, quiet. “I know what went wrong. This time it will work. Will you believe me?”
The flame of Perrin’s hope had been all but extinguished when their pain returned. But they looked into Clement’s face with an intentness that any healer knew—they wanted to hope, they wanted to believe that they could be healed.
The flame rekindled. They nodded.
“Hold that thought,” said Clement. “Hold it as hard as you can.”
Each of them made contact with Perrin’s skin: head, ankles, wrists.
“Just as we planned,” said Clement. “We’ve done each bit separately, at least. Alys, we’ll be right with you.” Not Tixerrant, this time. If there were ever an array where you could drop the rules of formality, it was this one.
“I’m ready.” Alys smiled back at them.
“What are you doing?” Brodier said. “You’re— That’s completely wrong—”
Clement sang an anchor note. A different one, this time. The others joined in. They let it hum and soften, filling the space, and the Theatre quietened as it always would before a healing. Even Brodier stopped talking.
Clement said, “Let’s begin.”
The genius of Ysabel’s technique was not simply in piecing together a handful of others.
It was in how those techniques were combined and performed.
Not with the roles being shared out amongst a group, even if the majority of them were arranged on the single radial, with one healer leading the push.
This was a healing done in absolute unison. Every part of the technique had to be performed by every participating healer, with their magics working as one.
The Grand Exam had it right in the philosophy, if nothing else. You passed together or you failed together. Nobody was more important than anyone else.
First, taking Perrin into the half-under state.
Jehan had talked them through it, but they’d not had their practice run, so they were relying on following the thread of his magic as closely as possible.
Clement kept the note going, giving them something to return to.
It was a soft muffling blanket of a healing, soothing the dance of the brain closer to sleep, not letting it tip over all the way.
Perrin’s breathing and heart rate slowed beautifully, and stayed steady.
They all relaxed into the new equilibrium, and then Clement took a deep breath and sang an interval above the note.
They had to keep the first one in their minds, keep a thread of their magic dedicated to Perrin’s consciousness, for the rest of the working.
Already Clement was beginning to tire. They pushed it aside.